AMD’s 4×4 solution crashes and burns

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i'm going to speak plainly here about amd's latest quad-core offering (see our coverage), the much touted “4×4 gaming platform.” amd's temporary solution is an absolute failure–i cannot be more plain than that. on 90 nm manufacturing processes, when examining the power budget and the relative performance compared to intel's high end quad-core core 2 systems there is no comparison: intel wins hands down.

amd's dual-cpu, quad-core solution built on 90 nm technologies consumes a ravenous 530 watts minimum just to power the dual cpus. that means each cpu's power budget is 265 watts. can you imagine putting a single cpu in your system that consumed 265 watts? that's what you're doing with the 4×4 platform. that cpu power budget alone is over 100 watts higher than the entire quad-core core 2 platform's total power consumption.

one good point of note: amd's cpus still show very powerful performance on cpu-specific benchmarks. amd does still dominate the cpu-intensive benchmarks, even against intel's fastest core 2 processor. nonetheless, while it does speak to amd's strong internal design, something that has been true even back to the days of when amd's offerings competed against intel's pentium iii, it's still not enough to compensate for it losing every other real-world or practical benchmark. not many of us have cpu-only tasks that we must perform day-in/day-out, but most of us use applications that are a balance of cpu processing and external memory requirements, meaning the intel offering is the choice to make today, and without reservation.

what we end up with in the amd solution is an expensive, power-consuming, lesser performing hack, if i may be so bold. at 90 nm amd had no choice but to produe a dual-socket quad-core solution because no practical heat removal system in existence could remove 550 watts from a single cpu package efficiently.

frankly, i'm amazed amd released this product.

one other potentially brighter side note is this: what we do gain in this offering is the knowledge that amd's coherent hypertransport bus does work and can coordinate data between remote physical packages very well. the core scaling between a single core and all four cores runs about 77% on cinebench 9.0, for example, meaning that it falls 23% short of the ideal of 100% scaling (in moving from processing data only on one core to all four cores). that figure shows us that even when all four cores need to be fed from the hypertransport bus architecture … well, the delay is not horrible. intel's best offering scales at 74.8% on its shared bus architecture.

amd's direction with 4×4 might not be one of raw performance alone–it could be a stepping stone of sorts. whereas dual-core users will definitely see an increase in performance when replacing their dual-core system with the new quad-core 4×4 platform, the requirements of having at least a 750 watt power supply, coupled to the lower performance relative to an equally equipped and configured quad core 2 system, result in a quick decision for most people: choose intel.

i'm looking forward to seeing what amd can do at 65 nm. if its processors do not scale any better than these offerings we're seeing today then i fear for amd's future. what we have today is an aging 90 nm process technology, dual-socket quad-core solution from amd that simply cannot cut the mustard when placed next to intel's single-socket quad-core solution on 65 nm process technologies. as of this day intel is definitely the x86 platform of choice across the board with its core 2 architecture.

read some of the benchmarks used in coming to this conclusion at tom's hardware guide, anandtech, and the inquirer. as always, post your comments below. i look forward to reading them as the path to success at 90 nm has come to an absolute end.

thanks to frankenquad for the heads-up on one of the benches.

user comments 26 comment(s)

amd is finished!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!(9:06am est fri dec 01 2006)rickgeek you finally have seen the light!

4×4 is an egg-frying power guzzler pos cobbled together to try and compete with kentsfield.

amd has screwed up big time with this ridiculous solution. – by squirrelzipper

it may be a killer server though(9:13am est fri dec 01 2006)the specs on this thing, like dual nvidia nforce 680a chipset, and a pair of opterons (masquerading as athlons) for about $600 could make this one very cheap, killer 2p workstation or server. the i/o options are unbelievable: 12 sata's, 10 usb's, upto 4 pcie x16 slots? – by bbbl67

surprising(9:31am est fri dec 01 2006)i cant understand why amd did not release slightly lower clocked but energy efficient (at 35w or 65w) processors that work with this platform. then the power consumption wouldn't have been that bad and we would have seen the power of ht in regards to scaling to 4 cores. as it is people are better of waiting for barcelona and new ht3.0 ready boards. – by shawmanus

i couldn't afford to have more than about one of these things running in my server farm. it cranks out so much heat that it's almost going to have to sit in a rack by itself. with a raid array added to it, and a big chunk of ram (as most servers would have), we're now talking about a single box that is going to consume about 1.5 kilowatts.

between the cost of the power just to run the box, the cost of the power for the added server room cooling, and the added space consumed by the extra racks required to maintain an acceptable thermal profile, this would be a *horrendously* expensive server solution. – by olmy

back to the board?(9:51am est fri dec 01 2006)i think these things can really get worked out with a little time. amd dropped a ball, but ya know, it happens to everyone. back on the horse and get a plan to make it work. – by mgeo

don't read too much into this thing(9:54am est fri dec 01 2006)i wouldn't read too much into this thing.

true: it's a power hogtrue: it's performance is not compellingtrue: limited motherboard options make it unattactivetrue: nobody is likely to buy it except for people who 1) want the bragging rights of saying “i have a quad core” and 2) are intent on fighting a useless brand-based holy war (aka, “better dead than intel”).

but i wouldn't read to much into this product. it reminds me greatly of some of the substandard crap that intel turned out when they suddenly found themselves on the short end of the performance stick a few years back. for some reason companies seem to see a need to bring something to the party, just to say “me too, me too!” intel has a quad offering, so amd feels the need to have a quad as well, even if it is cobbled together. and, in the grand scheme of things, i doubt that it cost them much to roll this out.

i doubt that this is a barometer for their future product direction. in 2007 they will bring out a more compelling offering. i personally doubt that they will close the gap with the core 2. with 45 nm coming in 2007, intel should be able to stay ahead of amd. and the release of nehalem in 2008 could result in another massive performance leap that puts intel way ahead again. but all of that aside, i wouldn't toll the death knell for amd based on this offering. the battle has a long way to go. – by olmy

niche market(10:40am est fri dec 01 2006)while this 4×4 might be a bad product for some users (like gamers), this could be a great product for some users (like engineers).

when we think about cpu's we tend to think about one size fits all. well, sometimes one size doesn't fit all.

4×4 suv is great in winter time in chicago, but it might be better off with a hybrid in nevada.

i personally think this new dammit platform is great for engineers (running simulations) and for small businesses (as a single server – print/file/firewall/proxy/etc).

maybe dammit themselves shouldn't push this as a gaming platform. – by pengdori

those who wish doom on amd…(10:46am est fri dec 01 2006)…or ati or any other tech company are pretty shortsighted and foolish. even if you never intended on buying an amd chip you want them to be healthy and selling competitive products. do you know how much intel would be charging for chips if they had no competition? or how much slower those chips would be if there were not pressure from amd? – by msp

keep in mind….(10:53am est fri dec 01 2006)when this product was announced, it was intended to compete with intel's core2duo. no one thought that intel would be able to glue two core2's on a single die so soon. also understand that intel's quad was produced because they knew that the 4×4 was coming.

when compared to the core2duo, this 4×4 solution works quite well, power requirements aside, which means that this product is actually a success when you consider what it was designed for.– by archerb

also…(10:57am est fri dec 01 2006)this product will scale very well to 8x when amd releases the quad-core/single die processors. so unless intel can come up with an 8-core system of their own (a core2quad2?), they will have nothing to compete with this. not that anyone would buy it, but it would make for bragging rights, much as these two quad products are today.– by archerb

amd released a quad, essentially because it had to. it is unbelievably power inefficient (i wonder why, considering that they do have some pretty efficient and compelling cpus), and its performance (not to counter you too much sir ricksalot) is all but a 'yawn'.

well, there still are lads that get their rocks off saving up their beans and installing a long-block 454 in a vintage barracuda or gto – supercharging it, etc … totally impractical, but hey – it looks good, sounds awesome, and smokes all comers. literally. that would be the amd 4×4, i think and to a tee.

we just installed a nice 2-chip / 2-core / ht-enabled intel platform upon which there are now 20+ virtual machines running. [32gb ram, room for more vms to spare.] none of the vms are particularly cpu intensive – even for seconds-at-a-time. so, the box just humms along, 25% overall cpu utilization and pretty decent hit-performance all day long. it has one of those fan-banks that almost makes it levitate, but hey what does one expect from a raised-floor server-room grade computer?

i'm sure amd will come up with something way more compelling in the future. i'm hoping that they'll bite the bullet and work on their floating point and ht numa performance to where “special drivers” don't make much of a difference. (one article raised the possiblity that the pathetic overall performance was related to no operating system's ability to optimize which cpu was running which thread, hence very high numa inter-memory-bank access.)

or, another almost sad way to look at it might be, maybe intel's unified memory ain't such a bad deal at the 2x and 4x levels (or apparently even at the 8x level). in fact, it could probably be argued that if anything in the architecture of cpus has plenty of development potential, it would be the memory bus speed component: although it sounds awfully exotic, why not clock a 256-bit bus at 1 ghz? yah, i know. bit line-to-line edge skew, the old bug-a-boo of parallel bus architectures.

still, when the ht/numa method – unoptimized to have threads run on cpus physically attached to the thread's memory (which has its own lack-of-performance problems) – shows such lackluster performance, maybe it is time to revisit the technology, and give it a shot in the arm.

maybe what will be needed soon is 'double virtual' memory. just as virtual memory performs the computationally intensive but very useful magic of normalizing a thread's address space so that it thinks it starts at address 0x00000100 (or whatever), but in fact may reside in nearly any physical block of memory on the system, double-virtual would work by migrating memory blocks as they're accessed to free blocks on the processor that is executing the thread. still it takes “help” from the o/s to only infrequently reassign a thread to a new cpu (assuming that the o/s runtime optimizer is trying to load-balance the cpus in some reasonably fair fashion). but something tells me that this hasn't been really 'looked at' yet, at least in the way that would free all o/s's from having to do all the work of moving the data and code around to follow the core-assignment of the threads running at the moment.

anyway – i disemble.

point is, numa isn't helping, 90 nm isn't helping, rubber-stamp-to-get-to-market isn't helping, and amd's core architecture is appearing to need a big ol' shot of new blood in order to kick it back into the competition.

i bet….(12:35pm est fri dec 01 2006)…that had to have been painful for you to type rickgeek. i commend you. – by rottengeek

re :archerb(12:49pm est fri dec 01 2006)> so unless intel can come up with an 8-core system of their own

they already have one right now. if you've got money to burn you can go buy two quad core 5300 series (clovertown) xeon's. – by pat_mustard

=o(3:06pm est fri dec 01 2006)goatguy,

i have no idea what you were talking about, but it sounded good.

this is most likely a desperate move by amd. just as rick said, they “had no choice”. it could be a temporary offer until they improve on it and release something more efficient. this one is a hog. toss in a christmas turkey, and you've got dinner cooked for the 25th.

anyhow, i'm sure intel may slow down a bit to let them catch up. i'd say the main motivation to progressive advancements is the competition and stockholders.

65nm is really needed now. i'd like to even see 45nm by this point. geek.com once had an article about how 45nm solves the issue of transistor electrical jumping, right? – by bye_bye

rick geek….(3:15pm est fri dec 01 2006)you cannot be like a cork floating in the ocean, in one moment upbeat about amd future,the other moment scare about their future….this phase in amd history is nothing new…it always happens at the end of a cpu life, remember at the end of life for athlon xp how people was talking all kind of crap about amd and how it was doom and after that amd came stronger than ever and is gaining market share up to this moment at the expense of intel….well i have good news for you: intel reign is about to be over….amd just demonstrated k8l and when you hear tom hardware saying amd is about to take back the crown is because this thing is a monster, anyway boys and girls enjoy the reading:

i didn't read the same thing you did(3:49pm est fri dec 01 2006)i didn't see anything that said they were about to take back the crown. i saw something that said that they were going to *try* to take back the crown. but that part should be self-evident. i wouldn't expect amd to sit back and say “ah, the hell with it.”

the story was also careful to say that they haven't seen anything to indicate the performance of the architecture that amd is previewing.

as i said earlier, i think amd has a good chance to close (at least a large part of) the performance gap in 2007. but i'm guessing that intel's roadmap will keep them just slightly ahead of amd.

time will tell. i love a good competition! – by olmy

bragging rights(4:54pm est fri dec 01 2006)is what it comes down to…

i sell pc's mainly to small business and amd am2 semprons kick arse for value for money workstations.

yes, if you want the ultimate in performance and bragging rights, intel has the lead at the moment, but in the volume market, it counts for nothing.

– by oss

an act of desparation – haste makes waste(5:37pm est fri dec 01 2006)recall ~6-8 months ago when the core 2 stuff was getting a lot of hype. amd completely trashed their road map and for months took a huge ration of crap about where was their new road map.

this 4×4 was the 1st waypoint on their new road map. it was a quickie attempt to show some immediate progress and i'm not terribly suprised that it is a total flop. haste makes waste

in engineering there are three basic measure of success– you can make it sooner– you can make it better– you can make it cheaper

a good product almost never accomplishes more then 2 out of those 3. in this case i'd say amd fell short on all 3.

– (not sooner) intel beat them to the 4×4 punch, something that was in doubt a year ago.– (not better) intel's parts are better in almost every benchmark. contrary to what i read here. slashdot and a few other sites are reporting that amd lost in every benchmark. since i haven't dug deeper i don't know for sure. but it sounds pretty bad.– (not cheaper) heat is proportional to gates & their size (which when multiplied is area) and also speed. if this thing is using a lot of heat it's a safe bet that it's using a lot of area which means higher cost to fab. i'm not sure if amd cranked the clock rate on this guy as well, i don't think so. so that heat is probably all area. area cost money, regardless what sticker price amd puts on this, that area is costing them more money and generating more heat.

i think amd had to release this part. they knew 6-12 months ago that it's performance was going to suck. simulators are clock cycle accurate, they knew what was going to happen right down to the nanosecond.

what they didn't know was how much intel was going to leap frog them by. that makes catching up that much harder.

a few million gate chip design cycle is 12-18 months. something like these x86 cpu is more like 2+ years. amd's answer to intel's new parts is in the pipeline. the problem is intel has 2x-3x as many manufacturing pipelines which also have cpu designs in them as well. a new fab also takes 12-18 months to biuld, longer when it's in germany, shorter when it's in asia.

this is why i'm so baffled by amd spending >$5b on ati. that's 2 new fabs or 1 new fab and a bunch of new cpu designers. more then enough horsepower to start closing the gap that we all see opening up at a startling rate. add to that todays news that ati is being investigated for anti-trust violations and you really have to wonder what amd was thinking.

oss — intel owns the volume market(5:43pm est fri dec 01 2006)somewhere between 75%-80% and in the server market in particular it intel's duals (not quads) that are going to start replacing amd's opterons. gaining back some, if not all, of the market share their xenon's once lost to them.

the server market lags the state of the art cpu market anywhere from 1 year to 2 years. the real blood letting hasn't started yet, this is just a preview of what is coming. just like when the opterons came on the scene, it took a year plus for the market share numbers to really change at all. – by ee92

arhat45(7:56pm est fri dec 01 2006)difference between 2002-3 was though northwood wasn't a bad proc it wasn't as good as conroe/kentsfield. also intel is not sitting still. by the time k8l releases intel is unleashing yorkfield. atleast from a spec perspective ( 2.7-2.9 ghz) it doesn't seem great as yorkfield is expected to be around 3.46 ghz.back in 2003 intel was caught with its pants down as they had no response to athlon 64. now they have 45nm/penryn and then nehalem. – by shawmanus

“amd's temporary solution is an absolute failure” even intel's netbust didn't get that scathing a review. all must not be right in amd land.

“it losing every other real-world or practical benchmark. not many of us have cpu-only tasks that we must perform day-in/day-out” the geekmeister admits it amd has lose in every relevanat performance benchmark.

lol and a monkey said “but i wouldn't read to much into this product. it reminds me greatly of some of the substandard crap that intel turned out when they suddenly found themselves on the short end of the performance stick a few years back.” the difference you idiot is that intel made billions during this time frame. amd is going to lose its shirt!

another monkey said “do you know how much intel would be charging for chips if they had no competition” i'll tell you how much, the same! yup the pricing structure is set. intel can't up prices or sales will drop. go to econcon101.

and final for the silly 4 legged friend. i figured out why he types incoherently. alan is laying the wood to the goat

amd is in big trouble! barcelona is too little too late. q4 thru q3 2007 belong to intel. by the time they get volume going on barcelona penryn will be stealing all the thundered. of course intel could bungle this. but whats the chance of that vs amd get a new architecture, on a new process node, in a new factory all right on schedule? tell me who is in trouble.. oh they also are trying to digest another company too.. lol

– by silly_amd

this is not the real 4×4 yet(7:02pm est sun dec 03 2006)i admit that this sucks, but this is not the real 4-cores-on-a-die processor that amd has been trumpeting. the real story here is that there are now two-socket motherboards that accomodate the new multicore chips.

so while i agree that only people who need a space heater should consider buying this setup, i'm also aware enough to realize that this isn't what all the amd hype was about. their new baby is going to have four cores on a single die, and this before intel can put out such a thing. and once that design moves to 65nm soi, we will have a horserace again. this leaves us with some downtime, so if you need a cpu in the meanwhile, you should buy intel like i did.

what i read from this move is that amd is trying to break dual-socket mobos into the mainstream. and well they should. their hypertransport interconnect is still far ahead of intel. but this primes us for my dream scenario of ati gpu's that fit into the second socket and do some serious vector numbercrunching for applications like video processing and encoding.

this is no small thing. really, there are left only two commonly-used applications that stress the cpu: media encoding and games. i have a feeling that in the near future, media encoding will be passed off onto the gpu. games already are. a big part of performance will depend on how well the cpu can communicate with the gpu, and in this, amd has a leg up. let's hope that these two-socket hypertransport boards herald a new era of finally putting good gpu's to good use even when games aren't being played.

i'm not trying to say that it's ok for amd to have second-rate cpu's down the line. but traditional measures of system performance are soon going to be determined by parameters. it's not going to be all about cpu's. – by zeus

debate you? i disagree with your assessment. i believe hector ruiz is the reason amd is where they are right now in terms of partnerships and developmental efforts involving partnerships. his vision seems to be one of an inability to do it alone and, therefore, a recognition of the fact that he needs partnerships to thrive.

i think intel is actually hurting a little more than we know publicly. time will tell on that one and i could be completely wrong. but their aggressive pricing scheme seems to indicate the same, as well as the number of failed architectural add-ons they had planned on having by now.

if amd falls behind it would seem to be only because of their smaller size and their inability to execute as quickly as they had planned (due to unforeseen issues).

we'll see. i don't think dr. ruiz is a dead man walking in 2007. i think his legacy, were he to step down today, would be one of prosperity and significant growth for the company. i don't think anyone can fault him for any of his actions to date. he's certainly not a “we're gonna kick ass” jerry sanders kind of guy. :)

– by rickgeek

simply put…(12:19pm est mon dec 04 2006)i'd love to see the qfx re-evaluated when the quad-core barcellona's come around and are shoved into that thing. maybe then i'll buy one, but for now my x2 system is just fine. – by x_archangel

im not convinced(5:44am est wed dec 13 2006)i have a core2 because i got a hell of a deal by workin in retail… but im not losing faith in amd. they will come around.

you people should be self-proclaimed movie critics. im not buyin it.. fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice shame on you, fool me three times? not today…